How to Tag Trades in a Trading Journal (With Examples)

To tag trades well, use a short, fixed list of tags in four groups: setup, mistake, emotion and context. Give every trade one setup tag, any mistake tags that apply, one emotion and the context that matters, then compare tags by average R once each has enough trades.

The aim of tags is simple: to answer questions like “which setup actually pays me?” or “what do news days do to my results?” with numbers instead of memory. Most tag systems fail for one reason: too many tags, so every tag ends up with three trades and nothing can be compared. This guide gives you a system small enough to stick to and shows what it reveals.

The four tag groups

The mistake and emotion lists above are the defaults built into TJ, and they make a good starting point in any journal. Your setup tags should match the setups written in your trading plan, word for word. If it isn’t in the plan, it isn’t a setup tag; it’s a sign you took a trade outside the plan.

Five rules that keep tags useful

1. Keep each group to about eight tags. You can always split a tag later. Merging fifteen near-duplicates is painful.
2. Define each tag in one sentence. “Late entry: entered more than 4 points past my planned level.” A definition stops the same trade getting different tags on different days.
3. Tag on the same day. A week later you remember the result, not the reason, and the result leaks into the tags.
4. Don’t tag the outcome. “Winner” and “Big loss” aren’t tags; the P&L already says that. Tag the decision.
5. Tag mistakes honestly, including on winners. A trade that broke a rule and made money is still a broken rule. If you only tag mistakes on losers, the mistake column will always look expensive and you’ll learn nothing.

CME Group’s lesson on keeping a trade log makes the same point from the other side: record why you took each trade, so that when you win you know exactly why and how. Tags are a fast, searchable version of that “why”.

A worked example: 60 trades by setup

Here is a trader’s month, with every trade carrying one setup tag. R is the result divided by the planned risk (see R-multiple explained).

Two things stand out. The setup with the highest win rate, VWAP pullback at 52%, earns the least per trade, because its winners are small. And the afternoon reversal has cost 3.9R, more than the VWAP pullback made. But it has only 13 trades: that’s a question to look into, not a verdict. A small sample can swing a long way on two or three trades.

Add one context tag and look again

Now split the best setup by the context tag “News day”:

The breakout looked decent overall at +0.30R. On normal days it averaged +0.53R; on news days it lost. That’s the kind of finding tags are for, and it took one extra tag to see it. It also raises a rule question for prop traders, since some firms restrict trading around releases; see news trading at prop firms.

These are example numbers to show the method, not results to expect.

How many trades before a tag means something?

There’s no magic number, but as a working rule: under 10 trades, just watch; 20–30 trades, start comparing; 50 or more, you can lean on it. When you compare, use average R rather than total R, so a tag with more trades doesn’t look better just because it has more trades. And check win rate and average R together: a high win rate with small winners can earn less than a lower win rate with bigger ones, as the VWAP row shows.

Tags worth adding if you trade a prop account

Prop traders have a second set of questions: not just “is this setup good?” but “is this setup safe inside my firm’s rules?”. A few context tags answer that:

• Account or phase (“Evaluation”, “Funded”). Many traders trade differently once real payouts are at stake. Compare the two.
• Near daily limit: the trade was taken with less than one full stop left before your daily stop. If those trades are worse than the rest, the fix is a rule, not a better setup. Our guide to soft vs hard daily loss limits explains why that room matters.
• After target: the trade came after you had already reached your profit goal for the day. These often give back the day.
• Last 15 minutes: trades close to your firm’s flat-by time, when a rule break is one slow click away.

Four tags, and you can see whether your risk rules are doing their job, which is a question no setup statistic can answer.

A weekly 10-minute tag review

1. Sort this week’s trades by mistake tag. Count each one.
2. Pick the most frequent mistake and write one rule for next week that targets it. If it’s “FOMO entry”, FOMO trading has six rules to choose from.
3. Once a month, run the setup table above and the setup × context split for your main setup.
4. Rename, merge or delete tags that haven’t been used in a month.

This slots straight into the weekly trading review routine, and the daily journaling routine covers when to tag during the day.

Tagging in TJ

In TJ, mistakes and emotions are built in, and you add your own tag groups for everything else (there’s a one-tap set of suggested groups to start from). You can tag several trades at once from the log, and the analytics break results down by setup grade, mistake, emotion, session, and performance after a loss. If you’re coming from a spreadsheet or another journal, import your trades first and tag the last month as a starting point. Try it free for 3 days at tjtrace.com.

Example trades and results are illustrations, not real accounts. TJ is journaling software, not financial advice.